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Beware the smartest people in the room, they are often the dangerous ones

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
16 Jul 2024
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The smartest people in the room are not always the most trustworthy, and they often believe in the eternal validity of their ideas and position in society. We should take lessons from history, near and far.

There’s a marvellous and quite insightful passage in one of the many works of that mid-19th century journalist on the New-York Tribune, Karl Marx, which often comes to mind when I listen to people presenting themselves as innocent, necessarily and eternally so, or as holders of bodies of knowledge presented as ultimate or complete.

They seem to forget that in our own imagination, we are, every one of us, the easiest to fool, and fail to acknowledge that our proximity to our own knowledge easily elevates our intellect above that of others.

In that piece, which appeared in The German Ideology, Marx wrote that “whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.”

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I would include politicians and public intellectuals in this class of people who are barely able to imagine themselves as something other, something superior and intellectually more refined, than they actually are.

A month ago or so, on 14 June, in a brief moment after Parliament accepted Floyd Shivambu’s appropriate challenge about the anti-democratic practice of counting votes behind closed door, the leader of the EFF, Julius Malema, slipped in a reference to how “superior logic” would always prevail.

Thereafter, by the time a video clip of Shivambu appeared on social media, the message was repeated that the EFF were the “guardians of superior logic”.

The EFF have always insisted that they are, indeed, the guardians and sole purveyors of “superior logic” in South African politics. That may be true, but telling the world, always, that you represent anything intellectually superior smacks of arrogance, and it often also conceals deep insecurities, insincerity and deception. It deflects attention away from facts that may be uncomfortable, and motives that are sinister – and potentially dangerous.

If the EFF leaders are the smartest people in the room, we have to be concerned. There are a couple of examples that can be entered here. The first one is/was unsurprising (capitalism rarely surprises), and the other is one to which I turn quite often as a reminder that “the good people” can do really terribly things once they have everyone believing in their proclamations of genius, of the eternal validity of their ideas and their place in history.

Greed and arrogance behind a mask of intellect and smarts


In their book, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, financial journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind detailed the way that very educated, very intelligent and very smart people led a successful private corporation into the largest business scandal in the US. Enron declared bankruptcy on 3 December 2001.

The Guardian referred to the Enron case as “a masterclass in hubris and raging greed”. The Catholic Reader in Australia referred to the endemic pride and greed that led to Enron’s collapse.

Fraud Magazine summed up the Enron disaster this way: “It collapsed into bankruptcy without ever reporting a losing quarter. More than $60-billion of shareholder investments became worthless; Enron owed $67-billion to its creditors, 20,000 of them who will or have received on average, 14 to 25 cents on the dollar. Nearly 5,000 employees lost their jobs with no severance pay or medical insurance, and far too many of Enron’s employees also had all their retirement monies invested in Enron, losing not only their jobs but also their retirement savings.”

The most senior executive officers of the Enron Corporation squandered more than a billion dollars, while investors and employees lost everything. McLean and Elkind’s book identified Enron CEO Ken Lay, (PhD from University of Houston); the Chief Operating Officer, Jeffrey Skilling (MBA from Harvard University); Chief Financial Officer, Andy Fastow (MBA from Northwestern University), and the accounting firm Arthur Andersen.

The most intelligent people in the room are not always the most trustworthy, and they often believe in the eternal validity of their ideas and position in society.

This brings me to one of my favourite topics. Readers who are not interested in European wars, cruelty, injustice and double standards may stop reading. But the next section cannot be ignored. It goes to the centre of a self-image of intellectual exceptionalism – that “superior logic” that has been bandied about.

The European Enlightenment: when good ideas hide bad people


The European Enlightenment is very widely considered to be one of the greatest moves in modern history of state and society, of knowledge production and the importance of “superior logic”. Again, all of that may be true, but the good ideas of the Enlightenment have served to deflect from the people who most treasure that era and what dreams may have followed.

One of the statements we invariably turn to when we discuss the Enlightenment is the 1784 essay by Immanuel Kant, which suggests that it marked a turn towards peace, progress, prosperity and reason. Kant believed that the Enlightenment was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity”, from its “lazy and cowardly” submission to the “dogmas and formulas” of religious or political authority.

The people, the Europeans, seem to have ignored all that. There was little peace to speak of in Europe. Starting from the date of the Kantian document statement in the 18th century, the enslavement of people in British colonies carried on, and France’s Reign of Terror, state-sanctioned violence, led to the public executions of thousands of people.

In the century that followed, Europe went through the Napoleonic Wars (1800-1815); successive wars of unification in Italy and Germany; Britain’s continued wars in India and Africa and later the Crimean War of 1854-56...

We can go on, until the current war in Ukraine and Nato’s preparation for further conflict, but the Enlightenment’s promise of peace seems to have eluded the Europeans, notwithstanding their good ideas.

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Eugenics, the “science” based on the belief that “the more suitable races or strains of blood have a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable” and which failed horribly (as a science) in the 1930s and ’40s, remained in force when, as Britannica explains, “the Nazis used eugenics to support the extermination of entire races” – especially the Holocaust against almost seven million people.

The continental Europeans were not alone… In North America, eugenics gained appeal with the “obsession with the supposed overpopulation of the world’s non-Anglo Saxons” and dangerous means “to deal with this problem”.

The “replacement theory” propagated by the Make America Great Again (Maga) crowd in the US is a sanitised version of this eugenicist panic about overpopulation.

The brilliance of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project cannot be denied, but one has to ignore the injustices during their research (see here and here), and the holocaust that was inflicted on Japanese people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Promises of peace and prosperity


It’s worth pausing on the fact that the Manhattan Project had important antecedents in Göttingen University’s scientific community. These issues, facts, directly contradict the 18th century promises of peace and prosperity that are so central to the European Enlightenment.

The American-inflicted holocaust on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the reality of nuclear conflict caused André Malraux, the novelist and art historian/theorist who would become French Minister of Culture in the late 1960s, to question “the credentials of Western civilisation” – which Europeans themselves have doubted.

We get to a question: How in human consciousness have the same people who gave us the “superior logic” of the Enlightenment been the most cruel and barbarous people in modern history?

In Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time, Bernard Wasserstein points out that contemporary history is a history of barbarism as much as it was of civilisation, of cruelty as much as it has been caring, of technological advancement and of environmental degradation, of colonialism and of Italian fascism and German Nazism.

In short summary, the most intelligent people in the room should not be trusted to be the better people among us.

As that 19th century journalist said, people like to make up stories about themselves, never mind what they actually are, what they do or what they represent. DM

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